Problem is that heaven and hell is Christian belief but Sider presents it outside of that context. — SpaceDweller

Exactly. Makes one wonder why.

Within the monotheistic religious doctrines that contain the concept of eternal hell, there are also specified factors that lead to it. Here, for example, in the RCC.

And I’m saying that any kind of existence can appear burdensome and dissatisfying in relation to the illusion of ‘individual potentiality’. — Possibility

Again, no. It's that any kind of seeking happiness outside cannot provide satisfaction. Whether one seeks happiness through obtaining things, relationships, or sophisticated pursuits such as art, it's all still unsatisfactory.

I’m not claiming efficacy, only potentiality. The difference is desire. I cannot have the life I want wrapped up in a bow and delivered to me, free of suffering. You say this is a ‘tragedy’, but I say get over yourself - what makes you think that was ever an option, let alone what you deserve? — Possibility

No, the idea is that any kind of existence is burdensome. It's about a dissatisfaction that would persist even if one had all the health, wealth, beauty, fame, family, friends, etc. in the world.

And I’ve repeatedly said so. — Possibility

Heh. You're not so humble.

it’s inaccurate to morally judge someone else’s actions based on your own evaluation of life.

How else is it possible to make moral judgments, other than on none's own evaluation of life?

I’m not saying it isn’t. I’m saying that we have the intellectual capacity to reconfigure how we make sense of reality, so that craving, dissatisfaction or suffering is not a ‘problem’ to be overcome. This may sound to Schop like PR spin, but there’s little difference between what I’m doing and what he’s doing - we’re just pointing people in different directions. Only he’s insisting that his description of the world is the truth, while I’m just plain wrong.

I disagree with both of you, I think neither of your perspectives is universally viable, but requires that a person has a sufficient measure of health and wealth in order to live in accordance with either of your perspectives.

I’m not going to defer to his perspective as ‘the truth’, and he’s not going to acknowledge my perspective as anything but an invalid default, because apparently only one of us can be right, and it must be him.

So much for democracy!

But I honestly think that BOTH our perspectives are valid, and the fact that I choose to live my life as if it has value doesn’t negate his choice to live his life as if it doesn’t, and vice versa.

What's up with this validity business? Are we looking for someone's validation?

I’m okay with that, and I actually think there is potentially a lot we can gain from a charitable discussion. But apparently I need to be discredited by any means, because everyone needs to defer to his perspective as ‘the truth’. I’m not okay with THAT.

Why aren't you okay with that? Can you explain?

The fact you don’t recognize that we are all burdened with the task of subsisting at all and overcoming it, is denied by you. We can try to work together but it would be in this recognition of the tragedy and not through obfuscating misdirection of vague optimistic slogans. — schopenhauer1

It's not that they don't recognize this task of subsisting, it's that they claim it's a matter of your choice, not of something forced on you.

In their view, when you're hungry, you _choose_ to eat. Your predicting that you will be hungry tomorrow and the day after that and so on, and therefore need to find ways to satisfy that need (by work, theft, reliance on mercy) is also something they see as a matter of your choice.
Perhaps with some arm twisting, they'd even declare that breathing is a matter of choice.

They are not alone in this view. A few more examples:

A Buddhist teacher once said in a speech words to the effect "your body is perfectly willing to die" and that it is a matter of your choice that you feed it, take care of it, etc.

Some spiritual teachers go further and say things to the effect that until you take responsibility for having been born at all, your life cannot really begin (Caroline Myss, IIRC).

In some religions, such as some schools of Hinduism and Buddhism, it is believed that one was born because one wanted to be born. Mormons, too, believe that one is born because one wanted to do so and chose it.

"Comply or die" isn't tragic to them, it's the baseline, the bare minimum. In order to see things from their perspective, you need to forget about what secular constitutions of democratic countries and the Declaration of Human Rights say about the value of a human being, human dignity, and so on. To them, this is merely about human potential, not about actual people. In their eyes, you get no credit simply because you happen to be a human. You yet need to prove yourself to be worthy.

I grew up on rock. It's much milder in the emotive department. The blues makes me blue, but it's a good kind of blue. Country music is too much, like I said, it fills me with infinite sorrow and desolution. — god must be atheist

This indicates a less than optimal fictionality competence.

The basic default of what a person must get out of life

So if you are not slated to lead a country, or to lead a country to war, or to get the Nobel Prize, or the Oscars, then what you absolutely must do is this: to have your baby walk down the street. — god must be atheist

And if someone doesn't do that? You will do what? Nuke them? Draw and quarter them?

How do you distinguish the influence between the good feels in general? — Constance

That's not what I asked you about.

One simply does.

No, it's more systematic than that. Can't you tell?

How would Thích Quảng Đức.the Buddist monk who immolated himself in 1963 be pathologically assessed? The answer? Very easily.

Killing oneself in a public place for a political reason is not a sign of a noble attainment.

I push kriya yoga to its limit. Pays off. It's only a pathology if you are on the outside looking in.

So it is with shooting heroin up your veins.

You may be averse to unorthodox approaches,

I'm averse to hocus pocus and to shallowness being masqueraded as depth.

but you should know where orthodoxy itself has it end. It is like this: Try any interpretative reduction that is possible, any at all, and you will end up in the contingency of language, aka, deconstruction. Deconstruction is all pervasive, because language itself is its own indeterminacy.

Again: In its proper application, the analytical mind exhausts itself.

This is what Buddhism is all about, I would argue: for language has its "grip" deep into the conditioned psyche; a lifetime of socializing that began in infancy.

Your description seems to hint at the jhanas.
There is, however, more to "Buddhism" than the jhanas. People often forget what it takes to get to them.

I've managed well through life without your gratuitious advice, so you can keep it.
/.../
That is really not a fair criticism, but then maybe you’re trolling, which you seem to be doing in many of your comments. — Wayfarer

If after all this time, you still think that ... then go fuck yourself.

It's not clear whether the idea is justified that enlightenment is somehow an objective phenomenon, quite independent of religions, and that different religions just have different takes on it.
— baker

At last! You say something connected to what I've written. Took some doing. It is, nevertheless, a thesis I find both defensible and appealing, because it points to a genuine 'higher truth' over and above the individual manifestations that have appeared in different times and cultures. — Wayfarer

On the contrary, it's not defensible. The different religions that have the concept of "enlightenment" or something like it have quite different ideas about what exactly it is, how to get to it, and how valuable it is.

And why focus only on "enlightenment" as a "higher truth"? What about "God" or "eternal damnation"? Those notions are quite common in religion/spirituality.

It's clear, though, how such a thesis as yours can be appealing. It requires no work, no commitment, no religious choice, no practice. It allows one to sit back and rest comfortably in the conviction that all is well.

It seems the whole implicit purpose of comparative religion is to emasculate the religions, to make them seem harmless, redundant, and most of all, ineffective, so that neither the need nor the desire for actual practice can arise in one's mind.

To paraphrase you,

After all, if all paths lead to the top of the mountain, then there's no greater purpose to be served in one's religious/spiritual/philosophical quest other than possibly warm feelings of self-justification.

Here you find foundational indeterminacy, which reveals itself as a wonder and horror of our being here. One has to step OUT of texts to witness this. — Constance

Such "stepping out of texts" is, for all ordinary practical intents and purposes, impossible.
What you're doing is just ditching standard religious texts, and firmly embedding yourself in other texts.

And you remain mundane, as always. — Constance

Oh.

Do tell how you distinguish between
on the one hand, religious/spiritual/philosophically deep/profound experiences or insights,
and
on the other hand, the feel good feeling you get after a good meal, or the experience of hypoxia, or what comes up when under the influence of intoxicants
?


It seems that you're ascribing profundity where it shouldn't be ascribed, but you miss out on occasions where it does.

So, I have a deep confusion about why philosophy sees this disconnection between logical necessity and physical causation. — Wayfarer

Logical necessity is about abstractly defined relationships between terms. E.g. If A, then B.

Physical causation is about figuring out between which particular physical phenomena which abstractly defined relationship applies. If I put socks in the drawer, they are in the drawer.

It seems to me computer science relies on the connection between the two - microprocessors basically comprise chains of logic gates to effect physical outputs.

It's still like putting socks in a drawer, just on a tiny tiny scale and super superfast.

Yes - but physical causation doesn't have to be all powerful, does it? I'm the last person who would argue that it is - I accept the reality of karma, for instance, which overflows the horizons of physicalism - but within its range of applicability, physical causation and logical necessity seem to coincide, don't they? — Wayfarer

Sure, because that's how we do physics.

I kind of agree on emotional grounds, but I'd like to come up with an argument that is harder for physicalism to simply shrug off. — Wayfarer

Why?

It is your opinion that the chance of someone’s life being less than their potential is sufficient enough to warrant non-being. Plenty of people disagree with this evaluation, and you claim they’re wrong, but all they’re doing is evaluating life differently to you. You have no way of proving your own evaluation to be objective - it will always be relative to the affect of your limited experience. — Possibility

Same goes for you. You have no way of proving your own evaluation to be objective - it will always be relative to the affect of your limited experience.

A person’s immediate situatedness is predetermined, but highly variable and ultimately as temporary as they determine it to be. — Possibility

Just google "create a life you love". But it's still all craving, granted, sometimes more sophisticated, but craving nonetheless.

If the mind is separate from reality, where is it? Describe what it is to be "separate from reality." — Ciceronianus

"Separation from reality" is a party line some people toe now that threatening others with eternal damnation isn't all that fashionable anymore.
But the intention is the same: contempt.

I read and watched Dennett’s discussion with Gregg Caruso about free will and Dennett often speaks about the “Moral Agents Club” and how if you want to live in a society and enjoy its benefits you have to be held morally responsible in a similar sense that people play by rules in a game and by doing so subject themselves to punishment when they make a mistake or lose. He uses the analogy of getting a red card in soccer. It has to work that way otherwise the “game” of society collapses and ceases to function properly. — Captain Homicide

But this is true only for ordinary peope, not for the elites. The elites don't have to play by the rules.

I’m not sure it is ethical to lie for my boss, or any other person above me in any hierarchy. — NOS4A2

It depends on how much you want to keep your job ...

What the hell has economic status got to do with how you treat people? — I like sushi

Socioeconomic status.

Pretty much everything. The class war is the only real war around.

The hatred that religions have often showed for other religions is one of the best arguments against religion. — Wayfarer

I think this hatred is an argument against comparative religion.

Why do you think it's an argument against religion?

As I said at the outset, when I embarked on that course of study, my quest revolved around 'what is enlightenment?' (Years later that would become a magazine title published by a turn-of-the-centuy bogus guru.) But I still think it's a valid and legitimate question.

The kind of cross cultural study of religion that comparative religion offers provides plenty of insights into that.

How does it do that, can you elaborate?

Every religion that has a notion of 'enlightenment' has its own ideas about what it is, how to achieve it, and how relevant it is.

It's not clear whether the idea is justified that enlightenment is somehow an objective phenomenon, quite independent of religions, and that different religions just have different takes on it.

I didn’t say you said anything about sacrificing truth, but you are willing to knowingly utter a falsity to preserve someone’s feelings, with little consideration to the feelings of others who identify as the opposite. I just think that behavior is less than ethical, more of a ploy to avoid confrontation than anything else. — NOS4A2

If the trans person is your superior at work, you must refer to them in whatever way they want to, and this has nothing to do with the trans issue per se, but with workplace hierarchy. Similar for other workplace policies.

It's only when the trans person is your socioeconomic equal that the trans issue comes up.

Perhaps not so useless; after all, it is not something to be measured by how it looks in the dress, the posture and behavior, and so on. — Constance

You're describing the experience of zoning out. It can certainly be pleasant enough, it can seem profound. But I question its value in relation to suffering.

Well, the broader context is philosophy's world: pull away from mundane affairs and ask more fundamental questions, like what does it mean to know something, not about the weather of if the couch is comfortable, but anything at all. But when you arrive here, you face indeterminacy, which is a term I lifted from others to use place of metaphysics. — Constance

I have always understood religion to include epistemology, and other philosophical disciplines.
Granted, some religions are more explicit about this than others.

In regard to this, I've had strange experiences with some religious people. For example, when I asked a Christian what the self was, he told me that this was the field of psychology, not religion. He preached eternal damnation to outsiders of his religion, yet he thought it is psychology that decides what exactly it is that burns in hell forever. Bizarre!

When you face indeterminacy at the foundation of all of our affairs, you are where religion begins, and where philosophy should be. The former is fiction, largely, the latter analysis.

Not sure I know what you mean here.
For the religious, there seems to be no such indeterminacy.

Do you know that god exists, or do you believe that god exists? — ZzzoneiroCosm

Neither. But simply for the sake of precision, I cannot just exclude the possibility that god exists.

So what? You're not allowed to have an interest in the subject unless you're a 'religious person'? Who get to decide that? — Wayfarer

It"s not clear how you get to that from what I said ...

My point is that comparative religion offers concepts that are alien to actual religions, concepts that are artificial impositions on actual religions.

For example, the idea that all religions are essentially about the same things, the same desire for the sacred. In contrast, religions typically take a dim view of eachother.

I know what they do and how they think. Philosophy's job, as I see it, is to take this, and give a reflective analysis. What is going on when we pull away from the participation, and see it in a broader context? — Constance

The moment we 'pull away from the participation', we stop being religious.

What use is the 'broader context' to a religious person?

The point of that study was, as the quoted section says, to understand the common themes in different religious traditions, through a number of perspectives. It was as near as you can get to a kind of scientific study of the subject. I found the anthropological and sociological perspectives particularly interesting. — Wayfarer

But what when no actual religious person believes those things? Comparative religion tends to offer concepts that are alien to actual practitioners. Religious people normally don't seem to have a metareligious or suprareligious view of their religion.

@schopenhauer1

I actually envy the antinatalists. They seem like really tough folks, or relatively well off socioeconomically, or both.

I'm down with a back injury. I haven't properly slept in days because of the pain. In a state like this, to think how meaningless existence is requires more stamina than I have.

Yes, it can look like this. It can also look like my uncle Raymond who has a phd in geology. Do better! — Constance

I'm refering to the uselessness of self-mortification practices.

Let's wait till we know god exists before we start calling things 'divine'. — ZzzoneiroCosm

You seem to think other people are as much in the dark about god as you. That's bold.

I hope your back pain abates, if it’s any comfort, I’ve had that occur twice in my life, both times it was excruciating but it passed after a day. — Wayfarer

Good for you. I'm not so lucky.

@schopenhauer1

How much misery can a person take ...

So, given the prevailing antinatalist view that simply BEING currently increases suffering, what is it that prevents us from increasing awareness of our potential to BE different, in a way that potentially reduces suffering? — Possibility

The conviction that merely reducing suffering is not enough.

The Nazi scenario is not 'grossly unrealistic' - it happened to my grandparents in World War Two - German troops regularly went door to door asking locals if they had any information about Jews and/or resistance people in hiding. My grandmother also happened to be hiding people in her basement. — Tom Storm

And the Nazi soldiers just took her word for gold?

This is what is so unrralistic about this scenario: that the soldiers would just belive people.

But this scenario applies to anyone who is asking you provide an answer to a question the true answer of which which could result in someone's harm. It's a simple way to dramatise the flaws in deontological approaches. Another good example would be a violent male asking if anyone knows the new address of his ex-partner who has fled his attacks. This comes up in my work a lot.

You are still letting the other person dictate the terms.

You could say any number of things in reply, or nothing at all, and they could all be true, and still not divulge sensitive information. You just need to be creative. Probably your granparents were.

The cure for all existential doubt and for all the distress that might befall the philosophically oriented is to not be philosophical, but to be superficial. That is, ignorance is bliss. So, if you wish to cure your wandering and confusion by refusing to look behind the fact that the goal you're pursuing actually has no meaning, I guess you could temporarily deceive yourself into thinking you had real purpose and that would get you through the day. — Hanover

Relative socioeconomic wellbeing shouldn't be underestimated. Not as a goal, nor in its consequences for the person's metaphysical outlook. It seems such people actually are happy.

Talk about rigidity.
The point is not to lie. You seem to think the point is to have the conversation on the other person's terms.
— baker

No, I'm pointing to the fact that truth telling can kill people. If we ignore potential consequences we are a fools. — Tom Storm

No. When it comes to people deliberately killing people, this is because the killer had the means the motive, and the opportunity to do so.

The Nazi scenario is emotionally loaded, but grossly unrealistic. If you think a Nazi patrol looking for hidden Jews would simply take a person's word for gold, and move on after a No ..

Theological fatalism is the view that we cannot make any free choices because God already knows what we are going to do. — SwampMan

You seem to think that your choice can only be free if nobody else knows about it.
But why?
As long as their knowledge of your choice doesn't interfere with it, where is the problem?

The origin of humor is existential complacency.

This is a philosophy forum, it is not a theology forum. I've tried joining a couple of comparative religion forums, they were a real mishmash. The thread topic is about the 'concept of religion' which I think is a valid topic and I'm attempting to address from the viewpoint of comparative religion. — Wayfarer

What is the aim and purpose of comparative religion?

Only much later in life did I begin to realise that what I was considering 'enlightenment' and what goes under the heading of 'religion' might have something in common. And that was because, when I started trying to practice meditation in order to arrive at the putative 'spiritual experience' sans artificial stimulants, mostly what I experienced was pain, boredom and ennui. So I gradually came to realise that this 'enlightenment' I had been seeking was not likely to be a permanent state of 'peak experience' after all, that, if there is such a thing as religious ecstacy, that it is a very elusive state indeed.)

That's because you didn't start off with purification of bodily actions, and purification of verbal actions. Those are an absolute necessity, without them, "meditation" cannot bear noble fruit.



* * *

I have to go now. I threw my back out the other day. I'm in so much pain I can't sit upright anymore.

So religious doctrine with regard to morality is to act as a past record of what people had found out about it.

Now. Why do we need a past record of what people had found out about it? Why not a current one? There are more people alive now than have ever been, so more people now should be directly in touch with god than have ever been.

Keeping a past record seems little more than archiving. If we want to know what's moral according to divine rule we'd be statistically better off consulting the current crop of religious cults than the written record of the previous crop. — Isaac

That would be religious moral historicism. But that's not the point of religious doctrine. Religious doctrines tend to claim to be "timeless", "not bound by time", "for all times" (also for all places).
The point of refering to religious doctrine as a source or justification of morality is that only religious doctrine has the potential to provide the metaphyiscal framework needed for an action to be judged as moral or otherwise.

The point is there are more people alive now than have ever been. So if some small portion of humanity are open to enlightenment or divine revelation, then what those people are saying about morality right now is a better guide than what a far smaller group said about it in the past.

In other words, why are you privileging ancient people's access to god (which they then wrote down) over modern people's access to god. — Isaac

There's thousands of cultists, gurus, prophets and Messiahs right now. You (or Wayfarer) may not personally like what any of them have to say, but that doesn't make it hard to see how morality from divine revelation could work without religious doctrine. On the contrary, it's easy to see how, we just need to ask one of thousands of cultists, gurus, prophets and Messiahs we have with us right now what's morally right and what's immoral. — Isaac

And when we compare those new accounts to the more traditional, older ones, we find the newer ones usually wanting.

But for this comparison to make sense, one actually has to study both the old and the new. If you, for example, study the Pali suttas on the one hand, and what some modern mainstream Buddhist teachers are saying on the other, it's clear as day that the latter are inferior. The difference is as evident as the one between hot pizza and cold pizza. But to see that difference, you just need to do the homework yourself, summaries done by other people don't work.

Fear not, I breathe. It is not as radical as it sounds. But you are invited to wonder what the experience is about. — Constance